


Five Things That Never Happened to Dana Scully

by anythingbutgrey



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 11:39:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11989053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutgrey/pseuds/anythingbutgrey
Summary: Dana—and she is always Dana now—looks out the window. She has stopped waiting. Instead, she watches.





	Five Things That Never Happened to Dana Scully

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2011. Archiving here. Spoilers for everything. Inspired by [this version of five things that never happened to Dana Scully](http://threeguesses.livejournal.com/4073.html), but a different take.

**01.**

It's soon after the one-year anniversary of her abduction that she finds out. Dana finds it odd to think of it like that, like a birthday, and yet she marks it off on her calendar that year with a red mark that could look like a star but mostly looks like a burn, twisted and malformed against the pale page of the calendar.

She imagines it was the anniversary that brought this confession. The way Melissa tells it, the — the _thing_ between her and Mulder ("thing" is Melissa's word, not Dana's) can be traced back to the day Dana laid dying in a hospital bed. That's Dana's words this time, not that she says them aloud.

But Melissa speaks of it like a confessional. "It just sort of — it happened a few months ago and then it kept happening and it just became a pattern and I don't want this to affect your partnership, this — this secret, I suppose."

Dana looks at her hands. Winter has begun, and the dry air and regular exposure to autopsy chemicals has started to chip at her cuticles. She doesn't really have the time for primping, and it's a bit useless. She uses so many chemicals every day that her nails have started to grow brittle and crack. Maybe she'll start getting press-ons. Some of the other women at work have them. Melissa has them.

"It's really fine," Dana says to her hands.

"We just shouldn't have kept this from you," Melissa says too quickly. Dana wonders how many times she practiced this conversation in front of the mirror. She wonders if Mulder knows it's even happening. Melissa takes one of Dana's hands in one of hers, and Dana complies with the gesture, looking up and at Melissa in the eye. "I should have told you," Melissa says, her free hand pressed flat against her chest, above the heart.

Dana gives a weak squeeze back. "I just want you to be happy," she says. As an addendum, she says, "Both of you."

At least that much is true. And Melissa grins, pulls Dana into a hug Dana feels smothered by, and then Melissa gets up and turns her back and sets about making tea too quickly. Dana closes her eyes when Melissa's back is turned. It's not that there's anything between her and Mulder. It's not that there ever will be. It's just that she has always felt she had something akin to possession over him, like he might belong to the X-Files, but he also belonged to her.

**02.**

The hospital is cold. The hospital has always been cold, since before she even moved in, it seems, and yes, it is appropriate to call it moving. Mulder brings her hot water bottles and heated blankets like the kind her grandmother used to have on the eve of her death. He brings her bad comedy shows on scratchy VHS tapes, and sometimes the recordings skip and she sees things she's not supposed to, and these are the only actually funny moments. It's good to laugh about sex. Dana remembers this from the days she used to have it.

"You're going to get better," her mother says by her bedside every afternoon, a tiny cross clasped between her fingertips. Mulder says nothing. Mulder is always there, it seems. There are no aliens in his world anymore, there is only her, her and this body that is not foreign but feels that way. She doesn't have much time left. They all know it. No one is willing to say it. And Mulder never leaves for more than two hours at a time, and sometimes her mother doesn't either, so Scully will wake up at four in the morning with nightmares and see the two of them leaning against each other in sleep. In the daylight they all have circles under their eyes. Scully sometimes thinks she is infectious.

"You should go home," she whispers one bright afternoon, too bright. "You don't have watch me all the time. I'm — I'm feeling much better today."

This is a lie, as were all the other times she offered this sentiment, and Mulder didn't buy it the first time and he doesn't buy it now.

"I'm not going anywhere," he says, but does not look at her. Guilt and sorrow have created a dark hue over him, like mixing together the precisely wrong colors of paint. Sometimes she wants to be angry with him, just for brief, horrible moments before falling asleep, but it can't stick. There's no other path for her but one with him, and this is something she realized a long time ago. She could have walked away from the X-Files if she wanted. She didn't. And now she's here.

She catches his fingers in her shaking hand. "I am glad you're here," she offers, and his smile falls flat.

Soon after, she falls asleep as the sun is setting, whispering, "Mulder, I'm just so tired." He presses his lips to her forehead as her eyes flutter shut and she thinks, in the morning I'll tell him, in the morning.

But Scully doesn't wake up.  
**  
**03.  
  
William is two. Then, William is three, five, nine. He asks about his father, about why he never came home and what kind of a name is Fox anyway. Dana — and she is always Dana now — looks out the window. She has stopped waiting. Instead, she watches.

"Your father was very brave," she says. She says this a lot.

William glares at her over his math homework. William is very smart. Too smart. She's not surprised.

"Yes," he snips. She smiles. Her impossible little boy, cranky at his impossible mother. "You always say that."

He puts the pencil down and folds his hands atop each other on the kitchen table. She stirs another scoopful of sugar into her tea. Outside, a siren passes, a surprising sound in their quiet Connecticut neighborhood. Dana can tell which hospital it belongs to by the sound patterns. She looks to the phone. Tonight, she doesn't care much for an ER visit. The clock ticks to 11:22 with a snap. Later, these details will be important, somehow.

"I found him," William says, and Dana wants to laugh.

"No you didn't," she says, and there it is, the faint sound of a cackle in the back of her throat, as though stuffed full of laughing gas.

William looks at her with sympathy. Her life is impossible. He looks at her the way one looks at the dead. Such a pity. Such a shame.

"He's been looking for you too," William says. But Scully doesn't believe that. Mulder could find a thousand things that weren't there but he couldn't find a woman in a small, well-lit house in a Greenwich suburb? Don't make her spit. But, then, she realizes, and this makes even the warm autumn day feel cold —

"You've spoken to him?"

William shrugs his little nine-year-old shoulders, as though recounting the events of his last video game. "I called. He answered. He's very quiet."

Dana does not know of a world where Mulder is quiet. Maybe William has the wrong man. Maybe no ghouls will wander into their home.

"He said he had to hide," William says, and maybe Dana hears a coating of anger in the back of his throat like a cold, or maybe that's her throat, her spite, her mucus building in the chest cavity. "And by the time he didn't have to, you were gone."

"Sounds like bullshit to me," Dana mutters before she can stop herself. So Dana is angry. She thinks she has the right.

Then, William plucks his cell phone from his pocket — Dana thought it necessary, given the circumstances — and places it in front of her. In the dark reflection of the screen, her face looks warped, stretched out, like a funhouse mirror. "See for yourself," he says.

But Dana doesn't touch the phone. She doesn't dare. She doesn't know what sounds have filtered through those speakers, whose voice, which words. Then, the phone buzzes like a bee swarm on the table. Her hand jumps to her throat, the chair screeching under her as she pushes back.

William takes the phone in his fingers, flips it open causally, too casually, with calm. He doesn't take his eyes off of her. She doesn't like feeling like the child here, and yet she does, flush with fever.

"Hey," he says, answering the phone. "Yeah. One second."

He holds it out in front of him. Dana thinks his hands shake. "It's for you," he says.  
**  
**04.  
  
This is after.

After the FBI, after the truth, after the motel room where they sat shaking and clinging for hours, like believers overwrought with prayer. They're in Pennsylvania again. She hates this state. Then again, she hates most states. Hawaii sounds nice. Maybe they should go to Hawaii.

Mulder laughs over his coffee. "My beautiful pale complexion in that sun? Too many years in the basement, Scully; I don't even know what a tan line means anymore."

She almost says something coy about spending most of their time inside but votes against it. Scully is many things, but she has rarely been _coy_. And still, somehow, this is… weird. She's seen a lot of weird things in her time, and fought against most of them, but Mulder tried to hold her hand in the park this afternoon and Scully wonders if they will become those people, normal people, the kind who stroll down streets with fingers intertwined. Granted, they were talking about viscera in the park beneath the oak trees, but she's learned not to push it. Her baseline for normal is different than most. It's not the private moments with Mulder she's concerned about. She has years of private moments, keeps them on file in her mind and seems able to conjure them up on a whim. _Hey remember that time_ , he says, and she does.

But still, things with Mulder have always been desperate. There have always been guns and blood and wars. After, there is just waiting. It's calm, even she is merely lounging in the eye of the storm. Her fingers tingle, as though sat on and now asleep. They're in Pennsylvania investigating a murder case that has nothing to do with Colonization and that they have no right to be near. They're going to get caught for nothing. But Mulder can't stop himself, and still loves to rush headfirst into a firestorm. Scully wants to scream.

She dabs her napkin at the corner of her mouth. "I went and talked to the sheriff again and she says —"

"Hey, Scully," Mulder interrupts, staring into the bottom of his water glass. She stops, folds her napkin, rests her right hand on top.

"What is it?" she says, a frown curling at the corner of her mouth.

He looks up at her. There might be a smile in those eyes, buried deep like a secret. "Do you remember when I told you about — about how if I ever started a home, settled, I'd move out to the country, some house with lots of land?"

She freezes. Her neck tries to strain herself toward a nod, but she isn't sure she moves. He looks at her and for a moment she feels like that water glass, stared into.

"I could start a home, I think," he says, and then he turns toward the window. She doesn't know what he's looking for. "I could start a home with you."

**05.**

There is about a month left before the end of the world. 34 days to be exact. It's the waiting (and the waiting and the _waiting_ ) that has burned the most this year. Scully has been marking off each day in bold, black ink on a calendar. She doesn't need the calendar, really. She already has perfect count. But she needs to maintain order. She needs to keep control over the days. It hides in her desk drawer. Mulder doesn't need to see it. To be honest, he doesn't even really talk to her anymore, and some days he doesn't even look at her. Scully is not angry. She knows the problem is that he simply cares too much, and so she is patient with his silences. And her body seems to be in its own internal freeze where seconds slow to hours and she catches herself staring at the leak from the faucet as it drips into the sink. It has been a long year, with too much planning and not enough results. The end of the world is hard to plot out, especially when you don't hold any of the cards.

The worst of it (or one of the worst of it, because this is a situation with a lot of _worst things_ ) is that she's been dreaming of William. There are long-forgotten prophecies she's been trying to remember, but she can only recall broken scraps of sentences she doesn't believe, something about salvation and something about the war. But her little boy is no more than a child. He can be no one's savior, and Scully doesn't expect him to be. She just doesn't want him to be anyone's prey.

"Clyde Bruckman said I was going to die from autoerotic asphyxiation," Mulder says that night when they both can't sleep, each syllable like the bright pluck of a piano string. Unsurprisingly, neither of them has slept very well this year.

Scully almost laughs, or at least gives her present day alternative, which sounds like a throaty guffaw. "I'm not entirely sure what to say to that, Mulder. Do you have a sex mistress you haven't told me about?"

Mulder smiles against her neck. She feels the way his mouth twists against her skin. She is so used to this, to him, their bodies, this bed. They're a home.

"I think he was lying," Mulder says, and his arm around her waist grows tighter. "I think what he saw was worse."

Scully shifts onto her stomach, turning her head to look at him. "You're extrapolating, Mulder," she says, in that old, scientist voice of hers.

He doesn't blink. "I know. But it worries me."

Her mouth turns. They spend a lot of time thinking about the war but Scully tries not to think about the deaths. His death. Such an option is impossible — sometimes she thinks this is literally so, because he has swept away death more times than any cat. And also she couldn't survive it. She'd just stop in place, sit on the ground and wait to die, lose a war over his body. So it can't happen, really. When she gets down to it. She runs her index finger along his jawline. In the moonlight from the window, she thinks she sees his eyes close.

"You and I have survived things far worse than death," she says, and though it's true she is not sure it will be enough. It is difficult to sleep that night. But then again, it is always difficult to sleep, and she wakes up the next morning, 33 days and counting, from another nightmare. It's no worse than the ones that came before but that it is freshest, which makes it feel the worst. Mulder is already awake, sitting up in bed, watching her as she startles awake. The sun has barely begun to rise.

"You too?" Mulder says. Scully turns away, swinging her feet off the bed and gingerly placing her feet on the floor, flattening them from toe to heel and shivering at contact with the wood. Her slippers wait by the closet, and she slips them on, slips out of the room, slips downstairs, slips into the silence of the kitchen like a mouse. She stands near the coffee pot as it drips, shivering in her robe. The heat might be down again, or it might just be a particularly cold morning, or it might just be in her head. She can't really tell these days. November is a cruel month, and this one is the cruelest. They've already had two blizzards. The conservatives on town laugh about global warming and she mumbles things about global climate change under her breath. It doesn't really matter. They'll be dead long before the planet dies.

This is what she is thinking about when the door rings, which is a song she at first thinks must be the howling of the wind outside because it's so very early, and a Sunday, and also no one ever comes to see them. But then the doorbell rings again, angrily, four times in a row, and Scully turns away from the coffee pot and moves to the door.

Mulder steps down the stairs as she enters the foyer. "If those are some feisty door to door salesmen, you tell them to stick it where the sun don't shine."

Mulder only makes jokes when he's worried now. Mulder makes a lot of jokes these days. They are always hollow, and always fall flat. He doesn't fool her. Scully opens the door and braces herself against the gust of wind that breathes into the house instead of bracing herself for the sight on her front porch, which is Gibson Praise in a winter coat and an adult now, startlingly so, with broad shoulders and the faint haze of a five o'clock shadow. Scully could laugh if she weren't so surprised by it.

"Gibson?" Mulder says from behind her, and she feels him step closer to her.

Gibson nods a sort of greeting. "I know things are happening. We're here to help."

"We?" Mulder asks, but Scully has her tongue caught between her teeth because she can see a small figure clambering up the snowy driveway and she knows who it is, who it must be. She's a mother. She can feel these things in her bones.

Her hand drops to her side, reaching back. Mulder's fingers are interlaced with hers in a second but she still thinks she's about to fall.

"It's William," someone says, and it takes her a second to realize it was her. The boy, her boy, steps onto the porch, hands shoved deep into his pockets, hair blowing about in the wind.

Mulder's hand goes limp in hers. She grabs on tighter, and it is one of those common moments where she is not sure which one is keeping the other afloat. William says nothing. He steps closer to the doorframe and does not look her in the eye.

"I think we can help," Gibson says. "Can we come in?"

Scully steps aside, presses her back against Mulder and moves her hand to hold onto his wrist. His breathing is short; she can feel the sputters of his chest against her back. Scully's not sure if she's breathing or not. She hasn't really cared to check. William steps into the house, closing the door behind him and then looking up and around, surveying the space. Then, he turns to them. His smile is soft, shy, but not afraid.

"It's nice to see you again," he says.


End file.
